Oakland: Inspired by Malcolm X, Asian American activist makes her own history

Annie Nakao, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Friday, September 9, 2005

EBKOCHIYAMA__0026_PG.JPG sitting on her bed covered with notes and corespondence,& political signs are all over her room, she speaks with much thought.
Yuri Kochiyama, social and political activitist at her apt in a sr. living facility.
San Francisco Chronicle, Penni Gladstone
Photo taken on 8/23/05, in Oakland, less

EBKOCHIYAMA__0026_PG.JPG sitting on her bed covered with notes and corespondence,& political signs are all over her room, she speaks with much thought.
Yuri Kochiyama, social and political activitist at her ... more

Photo: Penni Gladstone

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EBKOCHIYAMA__0026_PG.JPG sitting on her bed covered with notes and corespondence,& political signs are all over her room, she speaks with much thought.
Yuri Kochiyama, social and political activitist at her apt in a sr. living facility.
San Francisco Chronicle, Penni Gladstone
Photo taken on 8/23/05, in Oakland, less

EBKOCHIYAMA__0026_PG.JPG sitting on her bed covered with notes and corespondence,& political signs are all over her room, she speaks with much thought.
Yuri Kochiyama, social and political activitist at her ... more

Photo: Penni Gladstone

Oakland: Inspired by Malcolm X, Asian American activist makes her own history

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She's 84 and once in a while, she has trouble remembering a detail or two. But for Oakland resident Yuri Kochiyama, one memory remains unclouded: the day she met Malcolm X.

"...Malcolm looked up and seemed to be looking right at me. He was probably wondering, 'Who is this old lady, and Asian at that.' I stepped forward and called out, 'Can I shake your hand?' He looked at me and demanded, 'What for?' I stammered back, 'I want to congratulate you.' And he asked, 'For what?' I was trying to think of what to say and said, 'For what you're doing for your people.' 'What's that?' he queried. 'For giving them direction.' He abruptly burst forth with that fantastic Malcolm smile and extended his hand. I grabbed it."

Kochiyama's first encounter with the man who was to inspire her lifetime of activism is described in "Yuri Kochiyama, Heartbeat of Struggle," (University of Minnesota Press, $19.95) written by Diane C. Fujino, an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara. It is the first American biography of one of the most prominent Asian American activists in the country, whose work on behalf of radical political and social causes took root in Harlem more than 40 years and continues today.

"Most people make life; some people make history," Fujino said from Santa Barbara. "Yuri organized her life around making history. I think of her as a very ordinary person, who's done extraordinary things."

Fujino and Kochiyama will be at UC Berkeley's Heller Lounge on Saturday at an event hosted by the Asian American Studies department and Asian Pacific Student Development, and Eastwind Books of Berkeley.

While Kochiyama's name may not spark instant recognition, four decades ago she became part of a dramatic moment in history as she knelt on the stage of Harlem's Audubon Ballroom, cradling Malcolm X in her arms as he died of assassins' bullets.

"He was only 39 years old," recalls Kochiyama, who was in the audience that day.

Despite a debilitating 1997 stroke that has slowed, but not stopped her work, Kochiyama remains a committed revolutionary. Barely 5 feet tall, she hardly takes up much of her tiny studio apartment at the San Pablo, a downtown senior residence. A halo of wiry gray hair framing her slender face, Kochiyama clutches a pen and pad on her lap as she talks, so as not to miss anything important.

All around her are file cabinets, bookshelves, stacks of rubber-banded letters from prison inmates all over the country, cardboard boxes of papers, a computer, fax and copier -- accoutrements in her continuing efforts to keep "the Movement" alive.

"I can't walk any more," she says. "So the only prisoner I'm visiting is close by -- Marilyn Buck."

Buck, who is serving an 80-year sentence in a federal prison in Dublin for her involvement with the Black Liberation Movement, is only one of many prisoners to whom Kochiyama writes.

"Do you know there are 2 million people in prison in America?" she asks in slow, deliberate speech. "That's almost a country. The treatment of prisoners is so bad that Abu Ghraib has nothing on places like Corcoran and San Quentin."

Kochiyama moved to Oakland from New York in 1999 for health reasons and to be closer to two of her children, who live in the East Bay. But she didn't leave her politics behind.

On her walls are plastered her credentials of decades of radical liberation politics: portraits of Death Row inmate Mumia Abu Jamal, assassinated African nationalist and former Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and South African anti-apartheid martyr Steve Biko, bumper stickers that proclaim, "Free Palestine" and "Impeach Bush," and "Police Brutality Didn't Die on 9-11," a Che Guevara clock, a poster of "Women of Color Against War," and, of course, pictures of Malcolm X.

"I dare not think about what would have happened if I hadn't met Malcolm," Kochiyama says. "I was totally apolitical when I was younger. I didn't even like to read."

Kochiyama's unconventional life -- a mother of six who took to revolutionary causes, brought her children to protests and was arrested for occupying the Statue of Liberty -- would make plenty of fodder for a book. But as one of the few Asian Americans who, early on, forged deep bonds with blacks in some of their most important struggles for equality, she is also admired and revered as a mentor to young activists.

"To Yuri, one of the major problems in society is polarization; the other is racism," Fujino writes "Opposing polarization takes on greater significance when one believes, as does Yuri, that social change comes through collective action."

Fujino's book, together with Kochiyama's recent memoir, "Passing It On," published by UCLA's Asian American Studies Center Press, shine a rare light on Kochiyama, who still remains relatively unknown.

Fujino's exhaustive account traces Kochiyama's transformation from a California nisei, or second-generation Japanese American who experiences the Japanese American internment of World War II, to a busy mother in Harlem who begins to awaken to social injustice and racism, and to mature womanhood, when she is inspired by Malcolm X's vision for black self-determination.

It was an unlikely path for Kochiyama, who grew up in San Pedro, a small coastal town south of Los Angeles. Her parents were well-educated immigrants. Her father owned a successful fish store, and she and two brothers were raised in a custom-built house in the white section of town.

Mary Yuriko Nakahara, as she was then known, was popular -- she and twin brother Peter were school class officers. Full of energy, she loved teaching Sunday school, organized drives for the poor and even started writing about sports for the San Pedro News-Pilot.

This life was shattered after Pearl Harbor, when her father, a well-known community leader, was arrested and imprisoned briefly. The elder Nakahara, who had just undergone ulcer surgery before his arrest, died shortly after being released. The family, along with 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens like the Kochiyama children, were then forced into internment camps during the war.

The trauma of internment and her father's death would be themes in Kochiyama's later activism. But back then, Fujino observes, Kochiyama appeared optimistic, even "Pollyanna-ish" as the family did their best to adjust to camp life.

"Today, Yuri Kochiyama is regarded as one of the most prominent Asian American activists to emerge from the 1960s," Fujino writes. "But at the time of her father's death, she was apolitical, provincial, naive and ultrapatriotic."

At camp, Kochiyama met and fell in love with a handsome nisei from New York, Bill Kochiyama, who served with the legendary, all nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Continuing her community service, the energetic Kochiyama began a letter-writing campaign so nisei soldiers, including her fiance, could get notes from home. She later ran a USO in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for nisei GIs from Hawaii and the mainland.

After marrying and settling in New York City, the Kochiyamas began raising a family. But soon, their little apartment became "Grand Central Station" for visiting former nisei GIs and San Pedro friends. The family's "Christmas Cheer" newsletter went to about 3,000 people.

When a larger apartment opened up at the Manhattanville housing projects in Harlem, they jumped at the chance. The move would put them squarely in the cultural brew of the 1960s, with its fight for better schools and jobs, and a nascent black nationalist movement that Kochiyama soon became immersed in.

As an Asian among blacks, she was always sensitive of her place, working more as a facilitator and supporter. Her genius was networking, and as many leaders began being arrested in FBI crackdowns, she became the point person for those arrested, as well as those released from prison.

"... our first call went to WA6-7412," recalls activist Mutulu Shakur in the book, rattling off Kochiyama's phone number from memory 30 years later. "Anybody getting arrested, no matter black, Puerto Rican, or whatever, our first call was to her number. Her network was like no other."

The "K-kids," as Kochiyama's children called themselves, had an unusual family life. The older ones protested, often alongside their mom. Kochiyama lost two children in tragically early deaths, one by suicide, and the other in a car accident. Husband and helpmate, Bill, who found his own activist voice in the Asian American Movement, died in 1993.

Neither he nor his children ever knew who would be at their house, as members of SNCC, CORE, the Black Panthers and the Revolutionary Action Movement, along with anybody else who needed help, would show up.

One evening, Malcolm X arrived to meet some Japanese journalists, atomic bomb survivors who wanted to meet him more than "anyone else in America."

Kochiyama's relationship with the black leader, who met her only 16 months before he died, is often mythologized by admirers, Fujino says. What isn't exaggerated is his pivotal influence on her life as an activist.

Kochiyama's relationship with the iconic black leader, Fujino notes, also reflects the potential of bonds that cross racial lines.

"Malcolm X used to admonish: Study history," Kochiyama says in the book. "Learn about yourselves and others. There's more commonality in all of our lives than we think."

Live

Yuri Kochiyama and Diane Fujino are scheduled to appear at 2 p.m. Saturday at Heller Lounge in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union Building on the UC Berkeley campus, Bancroft Street and Telegraph Avenue. Call Eastwind Books at (510) 548-2350 or e-mail books@ewbb.com.